Don West [1906-1992] was born and raised on a mountain farm in North Georgia. As a boy he had a close relationship with his mother’s father, Kim Mulky. Mulky had been not only a Union soldier but a Radical Republican. When West received a scholarship to attend the Berry School during his high school days, he got involved in his first protest activity in response to the showing of “The Birth of a Nation,” a film about the Ku Klux Klan, a group West’s grandfather had taught him to oppose. In 1929 West graduated from Lincoln Memorial University, a school founded by Union generals at Cumberland Gap in gratitude for the contribution of the mountaineer to the Union victory. His classmates included two of the region’s greatest writers, Jesse Stuart (1906-1984) and James Still (b. 1906). All three subsequently attended graduate school at Vanderbilt University. Together these important literary figures constitute by far the most impressive literary class of any regional college or university. During the 1930s, Don West worked for several grass-roots groups including the National Miner’s Union and the Kentucky Workers Alliance. Late in his life West created the Appalachian Folklife Center near Pipestem, West Virginia. The book these poems come from is explicitly copyright free. West wanted his poems to be reproduced by anyone who found them worthwhile. He was a man of great Christian commitment to the social gospel who did not write poetry for the money. — From the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky, Lexington
Look Here, America (1946)
I want to tell, America,
About victory —
About sharecroppers, tenants,
Black men and Crackers,
And you must listen
And look
And think deep...For tomorrow in a new world
You must lift your head,
America —
Proud of yourself,
Proud that a Georgia Cracker
Can clasp the hand of a Black man
And say:
“Brother!”Look here, America.
Bend your head toward me
And listen.
Make your dreaming eyes to look
For I have tales to tell
And little pieces
Of twisted life
To show...You must look, America,
And listen
And think deep.
For even I, a Georgia Cracker —
One of your own mongrels —
Am grieved
By looking
At what I’ve seen...
Funeral Notes (1946)
We’re burying part of him today
In Hickory-Grove Church Yard.
We can’t put him all here,
For his grave
Spreads over a few rocky acres
That he loved —
Where peach blossoms bloom, and
Cotton stalks speckle the ground
On a Georgia hill.Forty years he’s been digging
And plowing himself under
Along these cotton rows.
Most of my Dad is there
Where the grass grows
And cockle-burrs bristle
Now that he’s gone...We’re covering him in March days
When seeds sprout.
And I think next Autumn
At picking time
The white-speckled stalks
Will be my old Dad
Bursting out...
For One I Lost (1946)
Pale moon
Hung on a
Ridge-top
At midnight —
All is still.Your song
Vibrates in
Dry leaves
Of heather
On the hill.Pale moon...
Your song —
A frosty
Grey night
In September...Corn shocks.
White stalks,
Bare fields
And You —
I remember!
Home-Coming (1946)
And I’ve come back to you,
Mountain Earth —
Come to laugh
And sorrow
And sing —
To dig my songs up
From your soil
And spin a melody
Of corn blades,
Top-fodder,
Crab-grass,
And a clean-plowed furrow.
I’ve come to sing and grope —
With a people who know
Deep songs,
Who stumble up
A long crooked road....
I’ve come because
Your great silent agony
Echoed everywhere
And the weary foot-steps
Of my old Dad
Still sound upon the mountain
Where his sweat dripped down
To water your dirt....
And I Have Loved (1946)
I have loved —
The bigness
Of everywhere...
Of living,
And the little things —
The soft beauty
Of a flower in bloom,
And a blood-red sun
Caressing the swollen breasts
Of a pregnant spring earth...
I have loved the mystery
Of dark, somber rivers
With little ripples gnawing
At the red earth,
And a splashing mountain stream
Splitting its heart
On jagged stones
As it slips to the bosom
Of the deep green river....
And I have loved
The calloused hands
Of a Kentucky coal miner,
The sad, solemn eyes
Of a hungry child,
The bent shoulders of a
Georgia sharecropper
Digging crab-grass from
His new-ground corn patch;
The splash of Mississippi
Against a tow of straining barges,
The strong words of river boatmen
And the way hard men can
Love each other;
The clash of steel on steel,
And the sizzle
When men pour liquid steel
Into puddling troughs....
And I have loved
The trusting grip
Of a child’s little fingers,
And the soft, yielding feel
Of a lovely woman,
Body close to mine,
Eyes deep and warm....
